Jane Austen Quotes
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...there is not the least wit in my nature. I am a very matter of fact, plain spoken being, and may blunder on the borders of a repartee for half an hour together without striking it out.
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Yet there it was not love. It was a little fever of admiration; but it might, probably must, end in love with some...
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A man . . . must have a very good opinion of himself when he asks people to leave their own fireside, and encounter such a day as this, for the sake of coming to see him. He must think himself a most agreeable fellow.
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What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps one in a continual state of inelegance.
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Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths.
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There are people who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.
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Not very good, I am afraid. But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?" "The nicest—by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding.
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I assure you. I have no notion of treating men with such respect. That is the way to spoil them.
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I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow.
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...but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.
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I certainly have not the talent which some people possess," said Darcy, "of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done.
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But there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them.
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My characters shall have, after a little trouble, all that they desire.
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The post-office is a wonderful establishment! The regularity and dispatch of it! If one thinks of all that it has to do, and all that it does so well, it is really astonishing!
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Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn-that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness-that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.
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I will be calm. I will be mistress of myself.
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I cannot help hoping that many will feel themselves obliged to buy it. I shall not mind imagining it a disagreeable duty to them, so as they do it.
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What is right to be done cannot be done too soon.
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My object then," replied Darcy, "was to show you, by every civility in my power, that I was not so mean as to resent the past; and I hoped to obtain your forgiveness, to lessen your ill opinion, by letting you see that your reproofs had been attended to. How soon any other wishes introduced themselves I can hardly tell, but I believe in about half an hour after I had seen you.
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And if I had not a letter to write myself, I might sit by you and admire the evenness of your writing, as another young lady once did. But I have an aunt too, who must not be longer neglected.
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Lady Middleton ... exerted herself to ask Mr. Palmer if there was any news in the paper. 'No, none at all,' he replied, and read on.
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I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding?joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid leaves with disgust.
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I certainly must,' said she. 'This sensation of listlessness, weariness, stupidity, this disinclination to sit down and employ myself, this feeling of everything's being dull and insipid about the house! I must be in love; I should be the oddest creature in the world if I were not.
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I am now convinced that I have never been much in love; for had I really experienced that pure and elevating passion, I should at present detest his very name, and wish him all manner of evil. But my feelings are not only cordial towards him; they are even impartial towards her. I cannot find out that I hate her at all, or that I am in the least unwilling to think her a very good sort of girl. There can be no love in all this.